Pending a vote this coming Fall which looks to be a sure thing, Apple’s proposed new spaceship-esque campus in Cupertino looks to be a sure thing. Large enough to house 12,000 employees, with a cafeteria capable of seating 3,000 people, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs boasted to Cupertino’s City Counsel that the structure, which Jobs called the ‘best office building in the world’, will be environmentally friendly and explained that the exterior won’t include a single piece of straight glass.
There’s not a single straight piece of glass in this building. We’ve used our experience in building retail buildings all over the world. We know how to make the biggest pieces of glass for architectural use. And, we want to make the glass specifically for this building here. We can make it curve all the way around the building… It’s pretty cool.
In an interesting twist a’la LOST, the parcel of land Apple’s proposed new building will be built on used to be owned by HP and was where both Jobs and Steve Wozniak used to work.
In a comment on a technology blog, Woz wrote that the “land is also where our small calculator division of HP, APD, was. It’s where almost all the design, prototyping and testing was done (at night) to create the Apple I and Apple ][ computers.”
Not too long ago, the LA Times caught up with Woz to ask him his thoughts on Apple’s planned new campus.
Q: What is your take on the “spaceship” design Apple has come up with?
A: Looks beautiful and efficient and environmentally friendly. I see it as a place I’d like to work for the environment.
Q: Did you ever imagine, during Apple’s early days, that someday the old HP facilities would be home to Apple offices?
A: The buildings where I worked was a smaller division on this land. Those buildings have been used by many other companies, including Apple, in the interim. I had never thought that the large HP Division would ever be totally cleared for such a new building.
But I must also tell you that we had been talking about a “campus” with everyone nearby since 1980 or earlier. Sites had been found but they wouldn’t work.
Steve Jobs always wanted a campus in one place, but I personally preferred the way HP had divisions more independent and spread across the country. It’s subjective and I’m out of the mainstream in this thinking for most Silicon Valley companies.
Q: You met Steve Jobs for the first time while he was a summer employee at HP, right? Did that happen on this same plot of land or at another HP site?
A: We met at the home of a mutual friend. Steve told me that he’d wanted a summer job so he called Bill Hewlett directly and got one. I have no idea where exactly Steve worked.
via LA Times
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Thu, Sep 8, 2011
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